


Seeds

by tepidspongebath



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, M/M, Magical Realism, Mary is not precisely a good person in this one, in and in between the episodes of series 3, mythology reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-06 08:59:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8743624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tepidspongebath/pseuds/tepidspongebath
Summary: “What’s in there?” he asked.

  “Pomegranate,” said Mary.

  “Ah. No thanks, then. With that stuff I can never figure whether to spit or swallow.”

  Mary gave him an arch look, and John tried to ignore how his ears turned hot as he leaned over to nick a piece of toast from her plate - a little boring, but the predictability suited him.

  “You swallow,” she said evenly. “The arils are perfectly edible.”
Wherein pomegranates are put to their mythological use; a small dog is saved; the mind of a murderer is thoroughly contemplated; and there is much to be said about doing nothing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In October, I had a real, live pomegranate for the very first time, and this happened. Slowly. Also, this is my first post-S3 fic. Warnings for the obvious Persephone references and a Mary who is not precisely evil but is not quite good either.

The inside of a pomegranate is a fiddly thing, she thought as she cut one open. All the twisty little chambers, seeds like red jewels embedded in the pith. It looked rather like a heart if you squinted, though not so easily breakable.

She didn’t have to do this. That was the awful thing. She didn’t have to use the fruit, and she knew it, but there was also no way to be certain he’d stay, and _she could not lose him_.

She’d seen the way they looked at each other, attempted strangulation and bloody nose notwithstanding. If someone had looked at _her_ like that, she would have held on and never let go, and if that meant clinging till her hands were bloody, so be it.

Currently those hands were stained with pomegranate juice. It was better than blood, she told herself as she washed it off. Sweeter and infinitely easier to clean.

* * *

“Eat something before you go.”

“Haven’t got the time, Mary. I’m late as it is, and you know how they were when I left early yesterday.” _For a case_. John didn’t say the words, but it had been a text from Sherlock that had him running off three hours before the end of his shift. It had almost been like old times: a clue, a chase, and a murder delivered not-so-neatly to Lestrade’s team. At the end of it, John had almost gone up the stairs to his old bedroom at 221B.

He hated to admit how easily he’d forgotten about his fiancee - or, no, not forgotten as such. Rather, it had been so easy to think of Baker Street as home, as if, after all this time, he had only been visiting the little house where Mary lived.

And so he stayed still long enough for her to approach him with a spoon laden with something that looked deathly sweet, and let her pop it into his mouth.

He spluttered. It was only because he hadn’t been expecting the texture: yoghurt with something in it that burst tart juice over his tongue. John swallowed quickly and felt a small, solid something else slide down his throat.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

“Pomegranate,” said Mary.

“Ah. No thanks, then. With that stuff I can never figure whether to spit or swallow.”

Mary gave him an arch look, and John tried to ignore how his ears turned hot as he leaned over to nick a piece of toast from her plate - a little boring, but the predictability suited him.

“You swallow,” she said evenly. “The arils are perfectly edible.”

“Good to know, since I just ate one. See you later, love.”

* * *

The next time they could sit down for a home-cooked meal, between the cases and the surgery and the wedding planning, Mary made salad to go with the pork chops. (John was in charge of those. He would be the first to admit they were nothing to write home about, but the potatoes he did as a side were pretty fucking spectacular, if he did say so himself.)

“A salad course?” he said, watching Mary lay the bowls on the table. “Now I feel special.”

“You need your veg,” said Mary smoothly. “We both do. Mushy peas don’t really count, and neither does the single lettuce leaf in a bacon sandwich.”

John wasn’t going to argue. After so many days of takeaway and frozen dinners, his system was crying out for some honest leafy greens. And the salad was good, though John wasn’t sure how he liked how the vinaigrette went with the pomegranate Mary had sprinkled over it. He tried two seeds to be sure, became certain that he didn’t like it, and apologized profusely as he picked out the rest of the deep red fruit from the otherwise inoffensive romaine.

* * *

John did three notable things the next day.

First, he saved a small, valuable dog from being hit by a small, valuable car. It was something he’d always liked to _think_ he’d do if given the opportunity, and he managed a decent job of it now that the opportunity had actually arisen. The dog in question, who was quite possibly all breeds all at once, was valuable as evidence - or even as a witness - in a case that was definitely not murder. In fact, it was a case of continued life, with the sister masquerading as the deceased until such time that her sizable inheritance would benefit her directly instead of going through a trust fund. Since that time was her her twenty-fifth birthday, just two days away and four days after she started her little charade, John almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But trying to kill the dog was unconscionable, and putting the car in reverse to run over Sherlock Holmes...well, that led to the second thing.

The second thing was that John Watson got to ride in an Aston Martin. It was the stuff of his boyhood dreams, up to and including the way he’d leapt into the convertible from a running start. He could even have been said to have _driven_ the Aston Martin, if you counted wrenching the steering wheel away from the would-be murderess. The car missed Sherlock by about a foot at any rate, and that was what mattered.

The third thing happened after the suspect was handed over to Dimmock and the dog handed over to the sympathetic housekeeper. Sherlock announced that he was feeling peckish, which was something of an extraordinary event in itself. And since John, no longer living at 221B, had no way of knowing when the man had last eaten, he passed Sherlock the bread Mary had given him before he ran out the door.

This was significant because letting go of that little loaf was a bit of a wrench. Mary was a wonderful baker and her bread was pretty fucking fantastic. John had been looking forward to eating it (pomegranate and nut - a new recipe), but Sherlock tore off the cling wrap as though it was getting between him and the Holy Grail, so that was worth it.

“Sure you don’t want any?” he asked, suddenly becoming unusually considerate with the bread halfway to his mouth.

“Just a bit then.” John broke off a corner and chewed thoughtfully while Sherlock inhaled the rest of the loaf and licked the crumbs off his fingers.

It was good. Very good. John’s piece was dense with flavor and riddled with bits of walnut, and, going by the single pomegranate seed he snagged, the rest of it must have been like heaven in a tiny baking tin. But it tided Sherlock over until they got to that Chinese place he liked, so John wasn’t going to complain.

* * *

During their honeymoon ( _sex holiday_ , said Sherlock’s voice in John’s mind), Mary came up with several uses of fruit that could only be called inventive. John wasn’t going to forget strawberries in a hurry. Or pineapples. Or the jack fruit, of course, simply because that had been so large and spiky and big and _different_ that he’d watched wide-eyed as one of the waiters carved it up after breakfast.

And there had been the two pomegranate seeds he’d eaten off her skin before the rest were crushed between them.

They left an embarrassing amount of sticky red stains on the sheets. John also had to leave a very apologetic note and a sizable tip for the housekeeping staff because he’d had an attack of conscience (he knew what it was like to have to remove difficult stains that weren’t your own), but that was all fine.

* * *

A month later, everything went to Hell.

* * *

She made a mistake. She made a mistake, and, God, was she paying for it.

It was the sort of mistake that would never have happened back when she’d still been an active agent, largely because it was the kind of colossal fuck-up that left assassins dead. But, oh, death would have been easier than this.

She was _glad_ John didn’t come home that night. Relieved. She couldn’t have faced him. By her own admission, she was an expert liar, capable of taking any falsehood or half-truth and _believing_ it so that it _was_ the truth by the time it passed her lips. (Lie detectors were nothing; thumb screws were a mild inconvenience.) But she couldn’t have hidden her agitation, her very real distress. Not this time.

If only she didn’t like that infuriatingly clever man. If only she didn’t love John quite so much. She might have been less emotional, more efficient. Magnussen would be dead (that was the entire point, and the fact that he was still a living, breathing stain on this earth was a travesty), and Sherlock...

Sherlock would either be firmly on her side, or dead, definitely so, with none of this nonsense of having been left to bleed out. Or more to the point, leaving him to bleed out and Magnussen - an eyewitness now, in addition to all the other danger he represented - with only a mild concussion. (She’d had more than one bullet in her gun, hadn’t she? It wasn’t as though she’d showed up to kill him with a fucking dueling pistol.) The whole business reeked of indecisiveness and ineptitude, and heaven knew she was never going to get another chance. Nor would she be able to wash the blood off her hands in this stolen life.

She knew all too well that her marriage certificate wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on if everything came to light, and the six pomegranate seeds might be all that tied John to her in the end. And even then, the charm only guaranteed he would stay. She could keep him forever, but that didn’t mean he would love her for it. He might well hate her.

Alone in the empty house, she covered her face and sobbed.

* * *

Mary - whoever she was - was in the house when John came to get his things. He’d put it off for as long as he could, but you could only last so long in the clothes you’d walked out in, even if you did keep a spare set at work.

She said nothing. She didn’t even stir from her seat in the living room as he threw his things into a suitcase (bought for their honeymoon/sex holiday, god fucking _damn it_ ), though she did look up when he clattered down the stairs, computer bag slung over his shoulder and case in tow.

He wasn’t going to say anything right back. If she was going to play at being silent and hurt, he was ready to give her the same and then some. But he turned around when he reached the threshold, unable to hold his tongue quite as well as he thought.

“What did you do?”

She started as though he had struck her. “What?”

“What. Did you. Do.” John put down the suitcase, transferred the laptop to his other arm because his bad shoulder was twinging, and he tried very, very hard not to shout. Or hit anything. Or anyone. “And I don’t want to hear how you did it, or how you meant it for the best. I just want to know what the hell you did to me, because by rights I should walk out that door and never set eyes on you again - it’s what I _want_ to do - but I know I can’t. I’ll have to come back.”

To give credit where it was due, Mary didn’t go in for prevarication. At least not now that she’d been found out. “The pomegranate,” she said. “You ate six seeds that I gave you, so that’s six months of the year you’ll be mi-” She stopped herself, her mouth twisted, and she looked so miserable that John had to fight the impulse to put his arms around her. “That you’ll stay with me,” she finished.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” said John, his voice quiet and terrible. “Any of it. You could have told us. We could have found a way.” And it was his turn to pause and rethink what he said, because the use of plural pronouns was quite telling. “I loved you,” he went on, deliberately casual with the past tense. “I wish you could have trusted that.”

Those were the last words he said to her for a very long time.

* * *

Sherlock was, not to put to fine a point on it, utterly useless for the first couple of months that John was back at Baker Street. John didn’t mind. It was a welcome development, given that the man was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest - a _fatal_ one for a handful of seconds. John wasn’t going to forget that in a hurry.

He spent most of his time at Sherlock’s bedside, partly to monitor his condition and mostly to make sure he didn’t pull any stunts like sneaking out of windows to arrange meetings with would-be murderers. Though, as Sherlock pointed out, you only had to do that sort of thing once and, now it was over with, the only logical course was to convalesce in peace so he could start doing things about it as soon as possible. He went so far as to mention that Janine was buying a cottage in Sussex, would John like to follow suit on a less permanent basis?

John didn’t. Truth be told, John found it difficult to want _anything_ since this latest proof that all his major life decisions led to disaster. He couldn’t forget that it was his fault - his choice, his _wife_ \- that had Sherlock broken and bleeding and sotted on morphine.

Thinking about it, about the memory stick he kept in his pocket (because today, _today_ he’d look at it, just give him another hour or so to get ready) only made him horribly angry or horribly quiet and numb, and he honestly didn’t know which was worse. It was much easier _not_ to think, to slip from day to day without looking too far beyond the things that needed doing: tea, meals, laundry, and, eventually when he was out of the hospital, changing the dressing on Sherlock’s wound.

He couldn’t help noticing that, for all the internal damage caused, it was small and neat, quite unlike the mess the bullet in Afghanistan had made of his shoulder. And that had John reflecting on the very specific nature of murder. It was vastly different from what he’d seen on the front lines, where, yes, you faced people who wanted you dead, but that was a very broad definition of _people_ and an equally broad definition of _you_. You didn’t learn names and histories and decide that this particular individual needed to die today. In fact, you tried to keep names and faces out of it, because otherwise, how could you live with yourself?

John knew what it was like to want to hurt another person, had done so himself more times than he liked to think about (notably, he regretted giving Sherlock a bloody nose, but was not entirely sorry for the string of restaurant brawls; his attack on Wiggins had been overkill, but the man had likely done something to deserve it; and that Met commissioner who’d come to take Sherlock away had bloody well deserved it, he’d do it again given half the chance). And he’d killed people. There was no getting around that. It was definitely true that but for one John Watson, several actual human beings might still have been walking the earth. _But he’d never set out to do it_.

He couldn’t imagine the sort of mind you’d need to have to make a living off of murder, the committing thereof: accept a job, plan the killing, pull the trigger, repeat as needed till the bills were paid. Your conscience would need to be about as functional as your appendix or atrophied altogether. And finding out that he’d shared his home, his life, his bed with such a mind had him reeling. Especially since the said mind had been planning murder _the whole time_ (since before she’d met him, to go by how long she’d supposedly known Janine). In addition to the small matter of not telling him the truth about anything, and that business with the pomegranate seeds, which smacked of the desire to _possess_ rather than actual love.  

Even though he was admittedly incapable of being objective about it, John could see that the tragic thing was that she might not know the difference ( _I would lose him forever, I will never let that happen, there is nothing in this world I would not do to stop that happening_ echoed in his head like cold steel dropping into a well). The truly terrible thing was that Sherlock had almost died because of it.

If he couldn’t imagine having the mind of an assassin, he was even less capable of imagining life without Sherlock. Not now that he’d lost him once already and, against all hope, gotten him back. Losing Mary, learning there hadn’t even _been_ a Mary was devastating, yes, but losing Sherlock...

That was when John realized she had had cause to doubt him after all.

This hit him as he was reading the morning paper while Sherlock was on the sofa, complaining that he’d preferred it when breathing was boring because now breathing _hurt_. It was absurdly simple, and, as Sherlock was so fond of saying, obvious, and, in all probability, John might have been the last person to find out.

Feeling began to seep back in then, and wanting, now that he knew it, oh God, did John _want_. But he did precisely nothing about it because he could feel the damnable pomegranate seeds like a subtle tug in the region of his chest. Six months, she’d said, and that tug grew stronger as each day went by. John wished he could be selfish, wished he could be brave, but he couldn’t believe it was anything other than bitterly unfair to offer Sherlock only half his life. (That Sherlock wanted him as well was not up for debate: John wasn’t so thick as to not hear what was actually being said in that speech at his wedding reception.)

However, not doing anything about it didn’t mean that it didn’t show. The feeling spilled over into real life and colored everything in 221B, from the tea to the laundry to the unusually clean and empty fridge, and it was too much to hope that Sherlock didn’t see it. Of course he saw it, he read John like a book written in flaming words five feet high from the time the newspaper rustled in his suddenly shaky hands on that first morning, and he proceeded to do nothing in _exactly the same way_. 

Doing nothing meant long, comfortable silences. Doing nothing meant fingertips brushing against each other when handing over mugs of warm drinks, and other everyday, incidental touches. Doing nothing even included John’s hands lingering on Sherlock’s body when he checked the bandages, his pulse, his blood pressure, when he looked over the scars that crisscrossed his back. And, strictly speaking, Sherlock reaching for John on almost any pretext (yes, he needed help getting up from the chair, into the cab, out of the shower - _in_ the shower, at one point - and into bed, he was recovering from serious internal injuries, medical assistance was _necessary_ ) still counted as nothing. 

Heaven knew where all the doing nothing might have led if, close to Christmas, John hadn’t come downstairs with his suitcase packed, his laptop stowed in its bag, and regret written on every inch of his face. 

“I have to go back. I’m sorry.” He rubbed at his chest where he could feel the pomegranate charm pulling fit to yank his heart out from between his ribs. “It’s the last thing I want to do, but--”

“Seeds. I know. I saw.” Sherlock’s mouth twisted as he interposed himself between John and the suitcase, keeping him from leaving for at least a few days, a few seconds more. “She may have you for six months, but for the other six, you’ll be mine. And I’ll always be yours.” Sherlock kissed him then, softly, hesitantly, as if he wasn’t quite sure how it worked. Nothing had ever made John so happy, unless it was gathering Sherlock in his arms and showing him that, yes, that was exactly how kissing worked. “We’ll figure this out.”


End file.
